All's Well That Ends (25 page)

“Not your fault,” she said. “It helped to know you believed me. And it helps to know that the cops asked Dennis about Phoebe, too. Maybe they are beginning to have doubts about her death. And I was thinking that if both women were killed by the same person, which seems logical, and if both times that person wanted the same thing, then if—when—the cops find out who killed Toy, we’ll have our killer, too.”

That should have been consolation, but it wasn’t. I had no confidence in the murderer’s being found. Toy’s murder was too unscripted and messy, and Phoebe’s too speculative, too theo-retical.

“Thanks,” I told Sasha.

“For what?”

“For being so foolishly optimistic. But keep your door locked,” I said. “Don’t let him back in, no matter what. Call the 195

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cops if he reappears. Don’t let your client in until you double check that’s who it is.”

“Oh, Manda, Dennis is all talk when it comes to me, couldn’t you tell? I mean he still wants me to make sure that house sells.

How can I do that if he kills me first?”

“He’d cope with selling it himself. And he’d endure taking the entire profit.”

She looked at me intently, then nodded. “I promise,” she said.

“Good.”

When all you’ve got going for you is an optimistic friend for whom you’re grateful, you want, at the very least, to keep her alive.

Seventeen

Marc Wilkins lived with his replacement woman in the near northern suburbs. According to his schedule, he was teaching tonight, which was good since I couldn’t come up with a reason why Ruby Osgood would need to see him again, let alone at home. I was reverting to being myself, and I didn’t want to see Marc in any case.

Mackenzie was with me. We were multitasking. Sleuthing and dating. Kind of. Find out about Marc’s whereabouts the night Phoebe died, then enjoy dessert somewhere in town afterwards. Our kind of a date. En route, I filled C.K. in with my various encounters, including the strange one with Dennis.

“He’s here on business?” C.K. murmured. “Interestin’. Marshall Fields surely didn’t send him here. So ‘business’ has to mean 197

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money. He’s trying to dig up money in Philadelphia. Why here?”

And then he was quiet for some time, working it through in his fashion until we pulled up to a garden-apartment complex that had seen better days. The grounds were sparsely planted, so that the winter landscape looked more bleak than it had to. The brick buildings’ shutters and occasional planter box needed painting.

“Lacks curb appeal,” I said. “I’m quoting the late Toy Rasmussen. Also doesn’t look as if Marc Wilkins is in the money as he’s reputed to be. Do you think Merilee’s claim that he spent his inheritance on the business is true?”

“Could be, in which case I grant him his idiot credentials. Or it may simply be that he wants to appear hard up,” Mackenzie said. “Easier on his wallet if he has less assets when he shows up in divorce court.”

“Either way, better for our case. His conviction that Phoebe stole money, and might have had it on her is surely a reason to have gone to see her, to be ‘M.’ He could have been looking for cash or for whatever form she’d converted it into.”

He laughed. “I hope you mean savings bonds, or a few shares of stock, not gold bullion or diamonds. How much money could she—if she had in fact taken any that didn’t belong to her—how much could a person extract from a pet-accessory business?

Maybe she converted it into those gold-foil-wrapped chocolate coins or paste jewelry.” He lifted his hand to ring the bell. “Unless Marc’s completely crazy, he’d know she couldn’t have taken much.”

“He keeps saying she did. Maybe there were hidden costs—

remodeling the building—buying the building.”

“That would have been still more insane. More likely his inheritance was small, and his lifestyle way over his head, and that’s why he’s living like this. Let’s see what his woman knows.” He rang the bell.

“What’s our cover story? What did you say when you made the appointment?” I whispered, admittedly realizing it was a little late for this question.

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“That—”

The door was opened by a sunny young woman who looked like she’d just stepped off the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. She had poufed blond hair, and wore red cowboy boots, black jeans and turtleneck, and a vest that had “Ashley” written in red se-quins. The jeans looked stitched to her flesh. “Hi!” she said. “I’ve been expecting you, even though I don’t know what I can tell you. I’m Ashley, Marky’s fiancée. Please come in.”

Marc’s fiancée led us into the small living room with the panache of a baton twirler at the head of the band, and waved us onto the sofa. “I made cheese crisps,” Ashley said. “Please, sit down and let me serve you. You must be thirsty. We have wine, sparkling water, beer, some of the hard stuff, coffee, tea, soda?”

This must have been her apartment. Marc had simply moved in. It had a young, temporary look, with posters tacked to the walls, board bookshelves balanced on concrete blocks, and carpeting that had been provided by a stingy landlord many years and tenants ago. I spotted the familiar girth and print of a

“Fifteen-month Student Datebook” atop the bookshelves, along with a heavy text with “Abnormal Psychology” printed on its spine. I wondered where she was going to school.

I also wondered what on earth Ashley saw in Marc Wilkins.

At this point, as her tenant, he couldn’t seem her ticket to an easier life. He was a good-enough-looking man, especially if you liked a slightly dangerous darkness about the features, a withdrawn sullenness. But he was twice her age and a pompous letch, and even if her wardrobe could stand a redo, she was a great-looking, energy-filled young woman. Why him?

It took a while until our many assurances that we were comfortable and loved her cheese crisps and that sparkling water was precisely what we’d wanted satisfied her hostessing needs.

“How can I help you?” Ashley then said with open eagerness.

I wondered if she’d been receptive to the appointment because we were much-needed entertainment. Maybe she was already a little 199

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bored with sulky Marc. Poor girl. That man was going to make all those bubbles in her personality go flat.

“We’re investigators workin’ on the Phoebe Ennis case,”

Mackenzie said. “We wanted to clarify a few things with you.”

“Case?” Her eyes widened. “I thought—I heard she committed suicide. Why is that a case?”

“Just an expression,” Mackenzie said. “Shorthand for case file. Did you know the deceased?”

“Not really.” Ashley’s cheeks reddened. “Not well. She—she came to see me once. She was upset about Marc and me.” Ashley shrugged. “She said she wanted to talk sense with me about that, but really, she was just meddling. Marc said she really wanted him to loan them more money for the business. He’d had this inheritance. It wasn’t that much, but it was nice enough, and he’d pretty much loaned the whole thing to those two women. I guess because Marc’s wife was her partner, Phoebe was in a weird place, but still. She didn’t have to come insult me, as if I were . . . She blamed me for Marc’s decision to stop loaning them money, but I’ve never taken a cent from Marc. It wasn’t my fault the business was failing. From everything I heard, it was her fault. All her fault.”

“It must have upset the two of you, financially and emotionally, the way everything was tangled,” I said. “Business and marriages and romances.”

Mackenzie looked sideways at me, and I stopped. Maybe the kind of investigation we were pretending to do didn’t touch on human emotions. “You understand that it wasn’t a loan,” he said.

“Of course he anticipated sharing in the profits, but it wasn’t ever a loan. Marc was the third partner. He put up the money to start the business.”

“Marc did? It wasn’t a loan?” Ashley looked at me, then at Mackenzie, her eyes slightly squinted. She looked as if she’d been left out of lots of loops and she was only now becoming aware of it.

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“One question we have is whether you’ll be making a legal claim against her estate,” Mackenzie asked gently.

“Me? How would I? Marc would be the one to do that, I’d think.”

“Will he be home soon?”

She checked her watch. “Not for several hours. You’ll have to talk to him tomorrow. He’s teaching tonight. The thing is, we aren’t married, so I . . . I don’t have any legal standing in this.”

“You’re his fiancée, correct?”

She shrugged. “Something like that.”

“I asked because there is some confusion surrounding the disposition of her estate,” Mackenzie said.

I have noticed that the two small words “her estate” calm and focus people. It did now, too.

“What kind of confusion?” Ashley asked. “And please, have more cheese crisps. I made way too many and they don’t keep well, they get greasy, and Marc gets all angry if I’ve made things nobody eats. He’s always saying, ‘waste not, want not’ and ‘a penny saved,’ blah, blah.” She looked at us. “He checks what he calls my ‘waste quotient’ in the trash and garbage cans every night, can you believe it?”

All was not well in paradise, and Marc was the snake. I couldn’t believe I felt pangs of sympathetic sisterhood for this child-bride-to-be, this husband-stealing young intruder. Nonetheless, I did.

Mackenzie took a deep breath. Something about the way he’d rearranged his facial muscles made me almost imagine him an insurance investigator, or whatever he was pretending to be.

He had the look of one who’d had countless interviews with the mates of men who pawed through the garbage every night.

“Things have gotten complicated because we’ve learned that Phoebe Ennis phoned a friend on the evening of her death to wish her bon voyage. This friend has come forth only now because she left that evening on a cruise, and she forgot about the 201

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specifics of the call until the unfortunate incident in the house this past week.”

“That woman,” Ashley said. “That woman who redoes your house when it’s for sale. I read about her.”

“Correct,” Mackenzie said. “So did this woman, and it triggered the memory of her conversation with Mrs. Ennis. I must make it clear that we still don’t know if it’s relevant, but in any case, it appears that Mrs. Ennis spoke to this friend about a visitor she expected later that evening.” He paused and looked at Ashley, giving her his premium blue-eyed beam. “It was Thursday evening, December first.”

“Yes?” Ashley said politely when she realized she was expected to say something.

“Given what you’ve just said about the so-called loan, it might interest you to know that during that phone call, Mrs.

Ennis mentioned the repayment of a debt.”

“Phoebe Ennis said that? Kind of like a deathbed confession or something.” Her voice was hushed. “Marc would be . . . he’s pretty upset about losing all that money, and . . .” She shot a look toward the door when she said his name, as if she shouldn’t have and she was worried about being caught at it.

As soon as this was all over, I was going to invite Ashley to lunch and make her reconsider this arrangement, if she hadn’t reached the same conclusion on her own by then. She was studying abnormal psychology. She had to know her garbage-scanning boyfriend was not normal.

“Not quite a confession,” Mackenzie said with a gentle chuckle. “But an interesting riddle, because she was talking about a debt owed to the visitor she expected that evening, and we don’t know who that was, which complicates the disposition of her estate. The mystery man—or woman—who was to visit that evening is apparently owed that debt, which is, of course, not mentioned in her will.”

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came to see her just the way she said, and she settled the issue.

Nice, so she could die in peace. Not that it was nice that she did that to herself.”

“That may be so,” Mackenzie said slowly. Slowly enough to think a way around this, I suspected. “But we have no evidence of a payment. No cancelled check, no I.O.U., no large withdrawal from the bank.” He shrugged. “Still, as you say, this may all be irrelevant, and perhaps not worth pursuing, but we do have to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t,’ as they say. If that was her wish—

expressed to this friend, who has nothing at stake in this—her wish on the last day of her life, then we must try to support it.”

While Mackenzie, the insurance investigator, trowelled it on, I watched poor Ashley’s face. The mention of money produced a dreamy, wistful look, but she still didn’t know where this was going. She wanted Marc to have been that mystery visitor, owed a great sum and repaid it.

“Only thing is, if he got the money, Marc should have told me, shouldn’t he?”

We said nothing. As far as I was concerned, any wedge I could legitimately drive between these two was a good and hon-orable wedge.

“It should have made him happy. The inheritance was a kind of cushion, you know? The screenwriting hasn’t been all that great lately, and teaching doesn’t pay enough, given his marital situation. What night did you say it was again?”

Ashley’s voice was like clear running water. Lovely. Maybe she really was a country singer. I had spotted a guitar propped against the far wall. “Marc might have phoned her, although I wouldn’t know how to check. Can’t you go over telephone records?”

“We can and will. We’re just trying to narrow the field,”

Mackenzie said. “And the date was December first. A Thursday.”

She stood up and took the fifteen-month planner off the shelf, shrugging, as if telling herself this was her datebook, and 203

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how was it going to answer any questions about Marc’s whereabouts or phone calls?

“He teaches Thursday nights,” she said as she flipped pages,

“so I don’t think . . .” Then she wrinkled her brow and shook her head. “Jeez,” she said. “It would have been nice to have Marky be paid back, but it was somebody else. She must have owed lots of people money, then, and that’s awful, but the fact is,” she pointed at a page, “we were in Virginia, visiting my parents.” She looked at Mackenzie. “It was Daddy’s fiftieth birthday that Friday, so we drove down on Thursday evening to be there in time to help Mama set up the next day. Marc had to get somebody to cover his evening class so we could leave late afternoon.” She looked at us.